Re: [docbook-apps] Docbook website XSL question

[Marcin Zalewski <zalewm at rpi dot edu>]

I may not be correct but as far as I understand there are two ways (by
default) to produce a webpage: tabular.xsl and website.xsl (with their
chunk versions). The tabular stylesheet produces a page with a menu and
uses tables to do the layout.

I would like to have a page with a menu (like tabular.xsl) produces but
one that does not use tables to do the output. Another problem for me
are various attributes buried in xsl (param.xsl) like background and
foreground colors, column widths, etc. I would rather like to get
something like this:

<div class="content">
	.....
</div>
<div class="menu">
	.....
</div>

for a menu, rather than:

<table>
	<tr>
		<td> menu here </td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td> content here </td>
	</tr>
</table>

I think that CSS is better to do layout of a page. It can do more or
less everything what a table can do and allows readable html that does
not misuse table element to do layout.

I hope I have explained myself better. I am quite new to the website
stylesheets so I might have misunderstood something. As for now, I wrote
a customization to the tabular.xsl stylesheet that replaces all the
table layout with divs. That lets me do all the layout using CSS.

Marcin Zalewski

PS. I just looked at the non-tabular output and that seems to be
actually closer to what I want but still uses tables for some layout.

Bob Stayton wrote:
> I'm not sure I understand the question.  The current website stylesheets
> make use of the DocBook XSL templates, and they output class attributes in
> the HTML.  Those class attributes are suitable for use with CSS.  Is the
> question whether such class attributes exist, or whether there should be
> more of them?
>
> Bob Stayton
> Sagehill Enterprises
> DocBook Consulting
> bobs@sagehill.net
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Marcin Zalewski" <zalewm@rpi.edu>
> To: <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
> Sent: Friday, July 23, 2004 8:01 AM
> Subject: [docbook-apps] Docbook website XSL question
>
>
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am trying to generate my webpage using website XSL. After lots of
> > trials I finally got it to work and produce valid XHTML.
> >
> > However, there are only two ways to produce a webpage using the default
> > distribution: text only or tabular. I do not want to use tables for the
> > layout of my page and I want to control all the styling through css. I
> > wrote an ugly customization css that produces html free of any styling
> > elements.
> >
> > I was wandering if there is a stylesheet available somewhere that
> > produces a css-ready layout. What I would expect is an html document
> > where all elements are named (through class or id) and layered for easy
> > style with css.
> >
> > Does anyone know of an existing stylesheet that does what I need?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Marcin